Shared web services are increasingly becoming popular. Some shared web services provide an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by enabling comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for enhanced business insight. Additionally, the collaboration and content management servers may provide information technology professionals and developers with a platform and tools they may need for server administration, application extensibility, and interoperability.
In some shared services, the infrastructure may include deployment of search services to multiple server farms. However, deployment and management of shared services and the provider topology may be difficult to administer. The challenge may become even more complex with the partitioning of the search index to support higher scaling.